Incandescence
by Zerbinetta
Summary: The life and times of Sarah Chagal, and what came afterward.
1. Chapter 1

"Where does that road lead?"

The simple five words that almost got her a slap in the face. Sarah didn't understand why. After all, she had asked a thousand questions such as that one already.

It was the first time she had ever left the village. Supplies were short and with the great winter that had not entirely passed, few merchants were willing to brave the cold and dark of the ancient forest riled with rickety paths that led to their remote corner of Transylvania. The only solution had been to send those not required for the upkeep of the village – and all those strong enough to make the journey and carry things back – to venture into the nearest larger town and bring back the goods necessary.

Her father should have been the first to go, but their inn was undergoing a sudden surge of popularity among the villagers, not least of all due to its steady – and steadily dwindling – supply of alcohol. Also, the place was small, but warm, and even the stink of the ever-present garlic didn't seem so bad when your very bones weren't shivering.

Sarah was used to the smell of garlic; it lined every door and window she had ever seen. One of her many questions had been why the homes of the townspeople beyond their village didn't seem to be decorated with it from every side. It seemed like such a design oversight to a child's eyes.

But now, they were on the way back home, and she noticed for the very first time the fork in the road they were taking; a path that seemed to have appeared out of the very moonlight. She hadn't noticed it previously, as they had left at the brink of dawn. Now, the sun was gone, the smell of garlic and burning torches stronger than ever, and an air of great fear all around her.

Her mother looked at her as if she had grown a second head.

"What second path, dear?"

"The one over there!" The child eagerly pointed through the darkness, focusing on a strangely shaped piece of rock. It almost looked like part of an ancient and neglected road – a proper one, fit for carriages, not the bumpy dirt. "There, deeper into the forest!"

"You're imagining things!"

"No, mama, look! There's even some light-"

Her mother grabbed her firmly by the shoulders, looking all too displeased. Sarah didn't remember this expression she wore; it wasn't the kind of anger she usually directed at papa for looking at a lady she didn't seem to like. It was a mix of terror and rage.

"Listen to me, Sarah. You must never, ever, venture down that path. Never, do you hear me?" Mama shook her for good measure, until her head was bobbing on its own accord. "Unless your life depends upon it and you have a cross with you!"

"But we aren't Christians." Sarah noted, confused. Her papa was proud of his Jewish heritage; her own name reflected that. Even at age eight, Sarah understood that the cross was of significance to the Christians in their village – to the majority of the place.

"That doesn't matter. A cross, or garlic, or something blessed from the village church is what you always must with you. Now forget about that… that place!"

"What-?"

"Do as I say!" Mama barked, satisfied at the girl's wince at her volume. And that, apparently, was the end of the matter for her.

So of course Sarah searched for the path the very next day.

The forest was beautiful during the day, even in winter. She found something soothing in the gentle swaying of the leafless trees, even if that made her seem odd to others. There was finally sunlight, unlike the grim grey skies of many weeks past, and Sarah expected her search to be easy.

She spent what seemed hours going around in circles. There was only a single road leading to their village, and the forest seemed determined to prove to her that there wasn't any other path leading through it. She tried to tell directions based on the location of the village, but things had looked so different at night…

It was an accident when she finally came upon what she sought; in truth, she tripped over the head of an ancient statue. It was breaking apart, obviously had seen better days, and its twisted body seemed to depict a winged creature of sorts, with enormous teeth. If it didn't look so strangely human-like, Sarah would have pegged it for a dog with wings; a much less threatening image.

Her hands were burning with frost moments after she took off her patched gloves, but she just had to touch the stone with her own skin. It was like something out of a nightmare, but frozen in time, too trapped and broken to threaten anyone. Sarah felt a strange thrill when she laid her hands on the statue, as if she was being so brave. Brave like the knights in the tales her mother sometimes told her, when her face wasn't burning with grim emotion that she told Sarah she would understand when she was older and had a husband of her own. That she should pretend she was a princess while she could.

Sarah didn't understand what "pretend" was just yet. But she didn't want to be a princess; that meant being captured in a tower, which just seemed so boring to her.

Unless she had a creature like this to keep her company, maybe. Not alive, of course; that would just be scary. But she could barely feel her fingers when she finally finished her exploration, and would have likely have kept on, if her own sneeze didn't alert her to the silence of the forest, the lateness of the hour… and the rustle of leaves not far away from her that could only belong to a swiftly retreating creature. It was coming from the direction in which the destroyed carriage road was heading…

The danger was something she was blind to; it could have been anything – a wolf, a bear, a particularly disgruntled rat – but her first instinct wasn't to run away, shrieking her little lungs out. Rather, she reluctantly let go of the gargoyle and carefully took a step towards the source of the noise… and another… and another…

Her father stumbled out of the darkness, flanked by two other men. Their air of toughness was somewhat marred by their large necklaces; rings of garlic. Papa looked entirely too frightened for someone wandering through the forest with at least semi-competent company, but clasped his hands imploringly when he spotted her.

"Sarah, you damnable, reckless girl! What do you think you're doing here?" She could already feel the spankings when Papa yanked her towards him and began dragging her back to the village.

"I just wanted to see the strange road I saw here yesterday!"

"Foolish child! Do you have any idea what could have happened to you?" Her father looked madder than when she had accidentally spilled that bottle he kept hiding from Mama at the back of her room.

"No, I don't!" Sarah exclaimed, struggling a little. "No one will tell me! What would have happened, Papa? Where does that road go?"

If possible, Papa turned even more ashen. "What road? You were imagining things again, Sarah! I keep telling your mother not to have you play so many make-believe games."

"I didn't imagine it! There was a statue there, and a road, a road for carriages!" Hadn't he seen the statue, the stones, the parted trees? "I just wanted to see where it went!"

Papa just repeated the panicked phrases Mama had spawned at her the previous day – filled with never, don't, not unless your life depended on it and even then, think it over carefully. But no explanations. Nothing.

There were spankings to be had, of course. Sarah really didn't think that compensated things very well. But it did deter her from returning for a while, and when she was caught trying to sneak out of the village and received further beatings without even a warning, she stopped trying long enough to forget the strange path. Even the dull little village contained many fascinating things for her young eyes.

Not that it could take that first step she had taken away.


	2. Chapter 2

After two more attempts at taking the mystery road resulted in nothing but further – and harsher – beatings, Sarah reluctantly gave up the pursuit of its secrets of a while. They would forget, her parents. There was always one more tankard to fill, one more traveller to house, one more plate to clean. As time went on, she was actually the first to forget. The world was just so interesting and boring at the same time, sometimes things in her dreams were more vivid than those in life. And so, the gargoyle and the path blended into the rest of her imaginings, and, for a time, all was right in the little village.

However, as she grew, she began to notice more and more that anything, be it childish games or drunken revelry, never had a place in the village after sunset. Older girls especially seemed to fear the outdoors, to the extent that silly Agnes would squeak like a fleeing rat if even darker clouds concealed the sun. Sarah thought that superbly silly and tried to make the other girls laugh, but no one shared her merriment. That made her particularly cross. She was usually the example to be followed, the daring wild girl everyone wished they were like – she still remembered being the envy of all the boys when she had caught that slippery toad that had eluded them all, and the terror of most girls – but no one seemed to agree with this.

"Mama said that the Elfking hides in the dark and kidnaps children to eat!" Stupid Agnes, to believe the stories. Sarah was a dreamer too, but she knew you were more likely to fear the wild animals in the forest than make-believe ghosts.

"No, no, his daughters enslave them until the life is gone from them!" Another girl quipped, shivering. "They serve the elves as gnomes and goblins until they turn into stone and clay!"

"That's ridiculous," Sarah said sternly, "Goblins wouldn't live with gnomes and elves, let alone serve them! Your brother has been trying to scare you again, that's all!"

"It's true! Sorin saw them! They took the miller's baby and danced with it until it cried!" True enough, the miller's child had disappeared one very stormy night, but that had just been an accident. Most said it had been born deformed and the man was just trying to spare his wife further agony by having to raise a cripple.

Sometimes, a lamb or calf wandered off, never to be seen again, and some of the folk actually saw it as a blessing. Sarah never really understood that. But at this nonsense, she scowled.

"You're a no-good liar!" They all squealed as she grabbed a fistful of pebbles and threw them at the children. Sarah ran off before they could retaliate. She knew how to pick her battles.

"I wish the Elfking got you!" She didn't know if she yelled it at them, or they at her – it almost seemed too cruel. But she didn't believe such things, so it must have been one of the others.

Mama and Papa would skin her alive if she asked them about such silliness, and they might still for fighting with the others, so she went to the one person she didn't dislike in the village. Magda had been working at Papa's inn for a few weeks now, a girl not far from her age. But to Sarah, she was almost like the adults – tall, with long hair, Magda seemed a woman grown. She was an orphan girl who had lived at the church's mercy when little, but now that she was too old to sleep in the tiny orphanage, she had to find her own place in the world. The Christians of the village looked at her with distrust, whispering about her flame-red hair. The girl covered some up with an ill-fitting bonnet, but could hardly be asked to hide the rat's-tail braid that hung down her back. Sarah liked the colour well enough; it matched the tiny freckles on her nose more-or-less. Papa hadn't hesitated before offering Magda a job and a room to stay. Maybe not being Christians made them better people; Mama always used to say they were the chosen of God.

That, and Magda didn't have a bad back that prevented her from cleaning the oven and the dirty floors.

When Sarah asked her about elves and goblins (she didn't feel so childish asking someone almost grown up about it), Magda frowned. "Them stories, they all have a grain of truth in 'em." she said first, "But that don't mean they always turn out being the way they're told."

"I knew there was no such thing!" Sarah declared triumphantly, even if she was lying. "They're just a bunch of babies who wouldn't know the difference between a goblin and a boar if it nicked them in the eye!"

"Best have neither boar nor goblin do that to you," Magda advised, "T'would be painful either way. But the point is, both are dangerous. Whether you call it goblin or elf or whatnot, there's danger in the woods at night. So you best stay inside."

"I hate this village." Sarah plopped down on a barrel, crossing her arms. "Everyone's scared of their own shadow!"

"Well, truth be told, some of their shadows aren't pretty. But people like things simple. You're trying to make things complicated." The redhead frowned, her bangs sliding down her forehead. "What's in the forest don't concern us unless it bothers us, and it don't bother us much."

That was true enough; cases like the miller's baby were few and far in-between. Magda had shared her opinion of it being a mercy on the part of the baker, rather than any true gumpkins carrying the child off. Sarah was almost tempted to latch onto this small revelation, though. Instead, she asked differently.

"So what _is_ in the forest?" she tried, with her best innocent voice.

Magda gave a small shudder, a tremor that could easily be attributed to the chilly autumn wind. "Death." she said, surprisingly bluntly. "Don't you go looking for it; you might not see it coming. It could be the frost, the beasts, the goblins – even your Elfking, if you're reckless enough."

"It's not my Elfking!" Sarah protested, but the serving girl just shook her head and went back to feeding the chickens. "Agnes told that stupid story!"

"Then let her keep it if it keeps her safe. An' you keep your boars well away from you, lest they find you too."

Sarah felt worse afterwards. She shouldn't blame others for not being as brave as her. Other villagers were superstitious enough, but she supposed that Magda had one good way of looking at it. She didn't mean to apologise for calling hogwash by its true name, but she felt bad about having thrown stones at the other children. True to form, they avoided her after she tried coming to play the next time, so she completely tossed the idea of considering apologising to the wind.

As all children do, she got tired of being ignored and all high-strung but alone after a day or two, so she marched out, nose held high, to give it one more try. But the usual playground was empty, and when she tried to see why, the rush of her Mama searching for the priest gave her some semblance of how serious it was – he and Mama usually didn't see eye-to-eye, with her stubborn resistance to his conversion attempts.

The whole village must have gathered. She crawled through the crowd to see why – she was still small enough, if only barely.

It looked like he was sleeping, really. It would be all too easy to imagine that at any time, he would just wake up and go on to work with his father. It was Agnes' brother, lying in the middle of the dirt-path leading to the smithy. He must have fallen, for there was dirt on his clothes and red stains in places, but Sarah couldn't see the wound.

Mama and the priest pushed forward, but she didn't understand. Why, the boy was fine! He opened his eyes and everything upon being touched, but recoiled at the sight of the priest. Sarah didn't like this. She wasn't fond of the priest herself, with the way he always tried to get her in particular to come along to his boring sermons. Frightening someone helpless with his bushy beard was just cruel. The boy hissed and tried to scramble back, but the crowd was closing in around him. Someone shoved Sarah when she wasn't expecting it and she ended up face-first in a puddle of mud. Or perhaps pig slop, but in retrospect, she preferred to think of it as mud.

The crowd was making more noise, but the sight of her ruined dress and the taste of grime in her mouth made her temporarily forget the commotion. Not even her smell managed to get her to the front of the mob again, and they were beginning to move when she finally stumbled to her feet. Only the group of children remained behind, most of them either two scared of their parents or what was happening to have it overcome their curiosity. Agnes was crying, but then again, she was always crying nowadays, so Sarah didn't pay it too much mind.

The other children wrinkled their noses a bit when she came near, but most were too focused on their friend or their own fear.

"What happened to him?" she demanded, her voice wavering only a little, as befitting her bravery. "Is he sick?" Truth be told, she felt a little like vomiting herself, now that the smell fully hit her, but she kept a straight face.

Agnes' tears only became more violent, her face red and puffy with sobs, she wouldn't have said a word if she had the will. The others stared at her with either vacant or frightened eyes, as if she were the gremlin that had hurt their friend.

"The Elfking took him." Someone said finally.

"But he was just there, fine!" She had a mind to call them liars.

"The goblins left a changeling in Steffan's place." A boy with wide mud-coloured eyes blurted out, shuddering.

Sarah didn't know that word. Nor did she understand. So she threw some more rocks at the children to make them tell the truth, but they didn't. Neither did Steffan; in fact, whatever truths he had to tell, only the gremlins would know. She never saw him again, or the changeling, and nor did anyone else. But there was a fresh new grave in the churchyard in the morning, and the other children started saying that the smell followed her around.


End file.
